The bottle gourd, calabash, or as it known in Bengali, lau, is a very common vegetable used in cuisine. After a quick wikipedia dive, I learned that it was actually the first plant cultivated by humans for non-culinary reasons. But it is an integral part of many dishes and even Bengali musical traditions. As such, this is a vegetable that we tend to have a lot of at home.
When I made this recipe, we didn’t ‘t have access to running water of regular electricity (thank you Texas Snowstorm 2021) so which is why this recipe, which involves no additional water, and cooks very quickly was ideal. The recipe is called lau khosha bhaja, which literally translate into bottle gourd peel fries, which is honestly, a pretty close representation of what it is.
The first step, is to actually peel the lau: you want strips of the peel. The peel of the gourd is smooth and pale green, and a little bit on the thick side.
Then, you have to cut the peel into tiny rectangles. They should be be big enough to see and taste individually, but other than that, as small as possible.
Then, I cut up half an onion and got some green and dried red chillies out in addition to nigella seeds.
These are going to be the only vegetables that are a part of this dish, so it is actually very easy to just whip up on a whim.
In a pan, heat mustard oil and a tiny bit of turmeric up. Really you can use any kind of oil here, but a fat with a strong flavor is definitely preferable. So mustard oil, olive oil, coconut oil, or even something like butter would be preferable to just vegetable or canola oil
One the oil is pretty ripping hot and the raw edge of the mustard oil and turmeric aren’t smell-able, add the spices and chillies. Fry them for half a minute, but quickly then add the onions. The onions will go for maybe 10 minutes until they cook down quite a bit.
While the onions are cooking you also want to add salt to the dish, because it will help the onions get to stage you want faster. (So add all the salt you want in the dish here and not later). The last step is simply to add the cut up peels:
Finally, just let this cook out, covered or covered, it doesn’t matter.
This dish is actually really tasty, in a slightly unexpected way. The peel of the vegetable has. really strong flavor, almost like a barbecue sauce, its a little sweet. And the actual vegetable, lau, is super healthy, but has an extremely mild/modest flavor, so eating the peel is when you realize where all the flavor compounds were.
I just know my mom would love this. She’s all for making other food from vegetables- zucchini noodles, cauliflower rice, and spaghetti squash make their way onto the dinner menu at least once a week at home. Bottle gourd peel fry looks like a savory snack that doesn’t take too much hassle to make!
I am super impressed that you were able to make this – even though you laid it out very simply I still think I would have messed it up somewhere along the way! I have never heard of lau so this was a really interesting read!